In addition to outline and side thickness templates, cross-sectional views are critical in accurately documenting and achieving a deeper understanding of watercraft design. http://jfmill.home.comcast.net/ 
damn… is this how everybody else has been doing templates from other boards? not that i want to be like everybody else, but it seems easier (or should i say more accurate) than flipping a board over on a piece of cardboard and holding it down with bricks and t-shirts… would 2x4’s be sufficient such a machine?
looks like a complete pain-in-the-arse-waste-of-time/money. the curves don’t need to be EXACT. what ever happened to coming up with your own designs?!
Who said anything about using that tool to copy other peoples boards? Cross sections are invisible. Why wouldnt you want to see that aspect of your boards design? Dont you also use outline templates?
Looks pretty clever to me. Who says you have to copy a board after you understand it? Maybe you examine it to see what works. Every design steps on the back of the previous work.
jonesy - i guess you just keep all your boards, so you don’t need to doccument the design details ?? it’s not even needed to copy a design anyway. Duh !! for everyone else, you can’t have too much detail on hand for design reference. this scribe idea is cool. (but if you want to keep scratching out boards with rocks and chisels, have fun)
Its not for drawing outline templates, widthwise cross-sections only. Estimated cost less than $5.00. Its fast to use and can provide some great insights… no pun intended! Think of it as a poor man`s MRI for surfboards.
duh, you wouldn’t even begin to understand how i document my shapes. stick with your little “tool”.
jonsey- we`re all eager students. Please share your methods of documentation.
I suspect that after a few hundred pretty much indentical boards, you really wouldn’t need one of these. But for most of us 10-board-a-year schmucks who like to fool around with different kinds of deck contours, it looks pretty functional. I don’t know about everyone else, but my stuff really started looking better the more I measured.
exactly lee, and we all know what kind of people bag on the ideas of others. it’s soooo easy to criticize, so much easier than being creative. swaylocks is a place for the free-thinking, creative, and curious individuals. complainers and sand baggers should … well, you know.
Since I am just putting together my first board I would like to see the cross-sectional veiws of many shapes. Like a catalogue of long board shapes that work for big old slow guys like me. Off I go to search the unimind.
I hope i wasnt the one that started the little argument, but i realize i was viewing the diagram from a different perspective. I simply clicked on the link, saw the picture, and hardly read. I was thinking this device could be turned on it’s side, and copy half of a board. Now that i think about it, this is very much so possilbe. the Bottom pointer that moves along the board would need a dowel or something similar at a perpendicular degree, and i believe a paint roller would suit nicely. Although it seems overkill for a simple process, it would be quite accurate. THis is a good example that we all see things different…
you could always just saw your boards into little slices and trace around the edges [wink]
I love these discussions where people get so fired up they start cutting their boards into little pieces for a better analysis … ha ha! Speaking for myself, it would be impossible to accurately build my custom surf mats without the ability to understand and design in 3 dimensions. Cross-sectional diagrams are essential when I create the exterior through the formation of the interior… literally shaping human breath.
The combination of deck/rail roll and foil can in itself give you the perfect outline and the combination of outline and foil can give you the perfect deckroll,by this l mean that when you have your rail band left to roll over you can sweep from tail to nose without stoping here and there because your foil,outline or deckroll is out.If this tool helps you get closer to the perfect craftsmen shape of no bumps and all lines melding together, l say go for it. KR
Looks like the promo’s for swaylocks in the shorty magazines have finally caught up with this message board. The intolerance and disrespect for other ideas seems to be creeping in alot more now.
Great tool ! I can’t wait to try it on the boards I’ve built and see how my deck, bottom and rails really are. As a begginer, I think I can learn a lot from it. The tool may also be very useful for my current project : a wooden hollow. Pierre
“you could always just saw your boards into little slices and trace around the edges” This is not as silly as it sounds. Before the days of computer generated lines plans.Back in the early days boat builders would make a half block model. This is a scale model of of a boat carved from a solid piece of timber.It is only one half of the boat looking down the centre line.When happy with the shape they would cut it into 10 or so sections perpendicular to the centre line.Then measure and scale up the dimentions to full size to produce a table of offsets and then a set of lines plans.David.
Oh gawd, they’ll let ANY idiot’s ideas in here… Actually, it’s a very old trick/technique from boatbuilding - taking the lines off an older boat for any number of reasons, including historical reference. The Royal Navy was doing it at least back around 1800. Surfboards, being comparatively simple hulls, are easy. If someone wanted to do this digitally it’d be fairly easy, just hook a pad and stylus to the cross-member and set the appropriate defaults in your drafting program. Or just use graph paper and punch in the coordinates. I’m sure there are many other ways to skin that cat. This could also be used for outlines, rocker, whatever you like. There’s enough digital calipers and the like that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult. Currently, cheap laser and ‘sonar’ measuring gear are not quite accurate enough to use. If you really wanted to do it up right, with servo/step motors to move your digital line gizmo and software to take off the lines, well, make the gizmo rugged enough so it’d hold a small router/laminate trimmer and you could have a gadget that’d rough-shape your board too. The appropriate hardware is mostly available, made for robotics hobby types. On boats, by the way, we not only do this as cross sections, there’s also diagonals - see http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/shipplan.htm for one example. doc…